Spelling+Instruction


 * Teaching Words That Students Misspell: Spelling Instruction and Young Children’s Writing**


 * Authors: Diane Beckham-Hungler and Cheri Williams**


 * //“The goal of our analysis is to determine whether using children’s misspelled words from spelling instruction, instead of prepackaged spelling lists, would prove beneficial to the children’s writing.”//**

For several years, the authors investigated the role of spelling instruction in young children’s writing. They knew from experience as elementary school teachers that students often perform well on weekly test yet transfer little of this word knowledge to their writing.
 * __Introduction:__**

The authors Hungler and Williams decided to examine the impact of a spelling program that consisted of words students misspelled in their everyday writing. This study was based in a 2nd grade classroom.

The spelling list used in the first study was created by district personnel; the words were chosen from spelling and vocabulary lists in the district’s basal reading series. The teacher spent approximately 20 minutes each day explicitly teaching and then testing the children on those words.
 * __Study #1__**

The children did well on their posttests, but when the teacher examined the children’s journals, she found they rarely used spelling words in their writing, and if they did, they misspelled these words 50% of the time, despite having spelled them correctly in the weekly tests.
 * __Results__**

The teachers gathered the spelling lists by analyzing the student’s journals and tallying the words that were misspelled most frequently. Over the course of the study, they generated 18 spelling lists. · 15 minutes of silent reading, · 15 minutes of journal writing · 15 minutes of group time: shared reading, read-a-loud, journal sharing, mini lessons on spelling, or an interactive writing lesson · 30 minutes of guided reading and word study for each group · 15 minutes of direct instruction · Spelling Instruction o Pretest of 12 spelling words o After test would place the words in a large pocket chart o Each week the instruction focused on a particular concept o Throughout the week she used various games One of the first things the teacher noticed, when she analyzed the data, the children did well on the pretest. They spelled correctly on the pretests many of the words they had misspelled in their journals.
 * __Study #2__**
 * Language Arts Block (daily):**
 * __Results:__**

Why did they perform so well? Perhaps the children knew how to spell the words but had misspelled them in their journals due to carelessness.


 * Good news**: When the children reused their “words learned” in their journals, they typically spelled these words correctly, on an average 85% of the time.

The reason for the success could be that in study #2, the teacher included a word study portion in her daily lesson plans.

Overall, the results lead the authors to believe that spelling lists of any kind are limited in their ability to take into account children’s prior knowledge or to anticipate the specific words that will be of greatest use to children in their self-selected writing.